Hecataeus: A What-If Analysis Tool for Database Schema Evolution

Abstract

Databases are continuously evolving environments, where design constructs are added, removed or updated rather often. Small changes in the database configurations might impact a large number of applications and data stores around the system: queries and data entry forms can be invalidated, application programs might crash. HECATAEUS is a tool, which represents the database schema along with its dependent workload, mainly queries and views, as a uniform directed graph. The tool enables the user to create hypothetical evolution events and examine their impact over the overall graph as well as to define rules so that both syntactical and semantic correctness of the affected workload is retained.